Opening the Gate to a World All His Own

William Christie opened his garden in Thiré, France, for a music festival.Credit
Natacha Semenoff/Les Arts Florissants

Thiré, France

WILLIAM CHRISTIE, among his many accomplishments, has managed to merge his vocation and his avocation. Having founded one of the world’s best Baroque orchestras, he has brought its music to his extraordinary garden here, which he has designed, shaped and cultivated over the last 30 years.

The garden mixes whimsy and formality and has been listed by the French government as a historical monument. It was the first time a garden has been officially listed during its creator’s lifetime since Monet’s Giverny.

The garden has been a private retreat, Mr. Christie said, a “secret garden” for himself and a few friends, where he found solace, contentment and privacy in a life filled with travel, rehearsals and performances. He spends half of his life on the road, directing and playing with the orchestra he founded in 1979, Les Arts Florissants, giving master classes at the Juilliard School and other institutions and, as he travels, coming up with ideas for his 37-acre garden, which is never quite finished. The latest, he said, is a design for a chicken run.

The garden contains different styles and settings — a formal Baroque courtyard, for example, and a topiary theater shaped like a pagoda, designed as living stages for performances. But only this year did he establish a music festival here, where for several days last month he and the orchestra, joined by singers and recent graduates of Juilliard, played selections from Handel, Charpentier, Corelli, Couperin and others.

“The idea of creating a whole world of one’s own, that’s very important. So I’ve always been ambivalent” about opening it to strangers, he said. “This garden has a Baroque exuberance, or extravagance, and I’ve been holding on to this for a long time, so that when it started to get presentable I decided I would do something more open to the public.”

The revelation of any private place is wrenching for any private person, he said, but it has also been a gesture to some of his closest collaborators. “Very old friends have suddenly discovered a facet, an aspect of my music, of my life,” he said.

MR. CHRISTIE, 67, came to France in 1970 to escape the Vietnam War and a period of American history he says he found unbearable. Born in Buffalo, he signed up for the Army Reserve to stay in graduate school at Yale and spent a summer training at Fort Benning in Georgia, which horrified him. “Seeing beaches full of ladies in white gloves applauding mock attacks on mocked-up Vietnamese villages and someone calling out the body count and people applauding, it was pretty grotesque,” he said.

He taught music at Dartmouth, and his contract was not renewed. At the height of the Vietnam War, and after the killings of student protesters at Kent State, “I was fed up,” he said.

Then serendipity struck. In Vermont, he met a man named John Evarts, who had been a senior Unesco official involved with music. “He was bigger than life, an American Brahmin,” he said, a descendant of William Evarts, a secretary of state, attorney general and senator in the years after the Civil War. “You’ve got to get out of this place,” he said Mr. Evarts told him, because Dartmouth was no place to begin a music career. He introduced Mr. Christie to the orchestra of the BBC.

Photo

Mr. Christie is the founder of an acclaimed Baroque orchestra.Credit
Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times

Equipped with a music degree from Yale and an untested talent, Mr. Christie, a harpsichordist, got a contract with the BBC and then built a new life in France. Here he has become a famous figure who has restored to the French their Baroque repertory and has been repeatedly honored by the government for his work.

The garden is considered a clue to the private Mr. Christie. “Bill has been making this garden for 30 years,” said John Hoyland, a garden consultant who has Glyndebourne, in England, as one of his clients. “This is a man who knows what he wants and has a vision. Who would dream of planting yew and turning it into a Chinese pagoda?”

The garden is a palette of greens, with relatively few flowers, Mr. Hoyland said, built on four basic plants: yew, hornbeam, box and lime trees. “But the range of greens and their vibrancy, and the way the wind moves through it, and the light, it’s just magnificent,” he said. “It’s a garden that calls me back.”

“The French had turned their back on their own musical tradition, and their gardening tradition, too,” Mr. Hoyland said. “Bill has shown the French their own heritage.”

BUT relations with the neighbors have not always been easy for such a flamboyant foreigner, who is both appreciated and resented. Mr. Christie described a meeting of the Thiré council to discuss some houses he had bought. One was to be a rehearsal space, and a council member said, “That means you’re going to make noise.” He wanted to say that he would make less noise than her yapping dogs, but restrained himself. “I thought I’d be cute and amusing and said, ‘Well, I get paid for the noise I make, and sometimes rather well!’ ” he said. “But that went down very badly.”

He said he felt it was important to open his sanctuary to his neighbors, and he also played concerts in the Thiré church. But his beautiful house, which dates from the 17th century and was an abandoned wreck when he discovered it in 1985, is off-limits except to friends.

One of Mr. Christie’s friends and sponsors, Dena Kaye, said that “to fill his garden with his music is a very great thing; this is monumental for him.” Ms. Kaye, the daughter of the actor Danny Kaye, runs a foundation named after her parents, and she and her husband stayed in the house for the festival.

She is working with Mr. Christie on plans for a French-American nonprofit foundation to continue the work of his orchestra and to preserve the garden and the festival.

“I’m 67, going on 68, and I can see where I’m going now,” Mr. Christie said. “I’m talking about the garden but also the Arts Florissants, and that’s far more important.” He fears that the French government, in these budget-crunching days, can no longer provide as much support to culture, and he feels a bit in a hurry.

“I haven’t had my say yet,” he said, staring out over the garden toward the grotto, on the hill beyond the river, as a fountain splashed and birds called to one another in the trees. “There’s an immense amount of music I want to do, to share and play with others.” He used the French word “pérennité,” or sustainability. “How do we keep things going?” he said. “And this has to do with this garden, the epicenter of my life.”

It is inspiring to open his garden to visitors, he said, but it is also a great relief when they leave. “You look forward to the moment when, ah, you can walk out into the garden at any moment of the day or the early evening,” he said. “And there you are, all by yourself.”

Correction: October 24, 2012

A picture credit with the Saturday Profile article last week, about William Christie, the founder of a highly acclaimed Baroque orchestra as well as an extraordinary private garden in Thiré, France, misidentified the photographer. The picture of the garden during a music festival was taken by Natacha Semenoff, not by Stéphane Audran.

A version of this article appears in print on October 20, 2012, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Opening the Gate to a World All His Own. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe